


Hurts Large and Small

by brilliantlyburning



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Angst, Canon-Typical Violence, Codependency, Fix-It, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Negotiations, Post-Canon, Post-Season 4, Scars
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-01
Updated: 2017-04-01
Packaged: 2018-10-13 15:59:12
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10517046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/brilliantlyburning/pseuds/brilliantlyburning
Summary: “Tell me you’d leave me,” John says.—John has been gone for six weeks. The flat's still in pieces.





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SincerelyChaos](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SincerelyChaos/gifts).



> Nominally this is set during TFP because the flat is destroyed, but I don't touch on the events of that episode otherwise. Otherwise this is a story about the aftermath of season 4, so that's how I tagged it. 
> 
> Many, many thanks to SincerelyChaos for inspiring this story!

“Oh,” Sherlock doesn’t say, “oh, so we’re doing this,” upon walking into 221b in the small hours to find John sitting in his old chair. Waiting: settled back into the familiar contours but his eyes are fixed ahead, not examining the shell of the flat. The walls are no longer singed black but neither are they wallpapered in baroque patterns. Beams stand out in stark relief, ghosts of walls that crumbled, and the room is lit amber by a sole table lamp set on the floor and connected to an orange extension cord. Half-one in the morning and London is quiet around them.

He spares a moment to be passingly grateful that he’d thrown the greasy chips wrapper into the bin before climbing, somewhat wearily, the seventeen steps to the flat; the homeless network had been exceedingly useless in terms of information and mildly dangerous in terms of temptation. “Come on,” one man had said—newly homeless, a junkie with the facial tics of a compulsive gambler and the shirtfront of a dog lover—”you know you want it, just a little bit,” and Sherlock had shook his head at the proffered bag of white powder before retreating, thinking of how disappointed John would be: and then he had remembered all over again John’s absence and, moreover, that his previous response to using had been abandonment as well, followed in short order by a one-sided fight and hospitalization. Anger had flared in him before extinguishing itself just as quickly, and Sherlock had dropped his forehead against the grimy concrete of a back-alley wall, breathing in the scents of cool stone and overripe rubbish before conceding defeat and returning home.

Six weeks, it has been: forty-two days, seventeen texts, and five orders of chips in the small hours of the morning. Six weeks since John has spoken to him.

In the dark room John inclines his head slightly, acknowledging Sherlock’s presence. “I should have known.”

“Known what?” He dislikes the openness of the sentence, the myriad possibilities of it. John should have known a lot of things—that severed digits belong in the crisper and not the top shelf of the fridge, that astronomy doesn’t actually matter, that Sherlock isn’t actually a girl’s name; but then, that’s never stopped him before, Sherlock thinks, disgusted at his own pettiness and thoroughly unwilling to relinquish it.

“That you wouldn’t be in a hotel.” Sherlock follows his gaze to the couch, topped with a familiar plaid blanket. Rumpled. “Why is Mrs Hudson’s flat fine?”

“Mycroft.”

“Ah.” A beat, while John takes in the flat once more: exposed drywall, flooring half-done and unfinished, threatening to splinter in the foot of anyone foolish enough to walk barefoot across the room. Sherlock has to admit the two chairs and the couch are incongruous in the unfinished room, but it wasn’t as though he’d expected visitors: only Mrs Hudson, who merely clucked her tongue and told him to use her spare closet, “so your lovely suits don’t wrinkle and pick up the scent of drywall, dear, it’s far more difficult to intimidate people if they think you’re a poncy interior decorator.” “What did you do, then?” John asks.

“What do you mean, what did I do?”

“I mean,” John says, worn features illuminated by the lone lamp, “that he’d started to have yours fixed as well, but then something stopped. And Mrs Hudson’s is fine; has been for two weeks, she told me. So I ask again: what did you do? And, you know, you only repeat things when you’re deflecting. Bit of a tell, that.”

Sherlock has been standing in the doorway, he realizes; if he’s going to be called out on his falsehoods he’d prefer it happen face to face and so he steps into the room, chin raised haughtily. “I suggested he bugger off and eat more sweets,” he says. It isn’t even a lie.

“Right,” John says. “Right.” There’s the clink of glass and metal, and John sets a flask down next his feet, a glass to his lips. Flask, glass, whiskey: he’d brought the supplies from his own flat then, the one where he lives with his daughter and the ghost of his wife; he hadn’t planned on seeing Sherlock, thought that he’d be able to drink alone in a ruined flat, and Sherlock doesn’t know what it means.

“I preferred when you drank tea.”

“Well, you don’t always get what you want,” John says tightly before ducking his head brusquely. The expression on his face reminds Sherlock of when he’d been in Damascus years ago in pursuit of an assassin, chasing down the remnants of Moriarty’s web: a bomb had gone off inside a building and while the exterior stood, the inside collapsed. “Fuck. That wasn’t—”

The words cut off suddenly, and John doesn’t look as though he’ll find them again soon. Sherlock moves away from the wall to sit in his old chair across from John, plucking the glass from his fingers as he sits. John doesn’t protest.

The whiskey is harsh and burns on on the way down his throat. “Cheap,” he informs John, handing the glass back.

“Posh arsehole,” John mutters, but he sounds almost. . . grateful. And then John’s eyes dart up to meet his for a second before he returns to contemplating his drink, and Sherlock sees that he was wrong: that John had hoped for mercy and now, having received it, resents Sherlock for bestowing it in the first place. It ties a knot in the left side of Sherlock’s chest as he thinks, staring at John.

“Where were you?” John asks abruptly.

He could tell John, of course; his use of the homeless network as an aid to his work is well known to John—but he dislikes the possessive note in John’s voice and refuses to indulge his delusion that Sherlock needs to justify his whereabouts, he tells himself, steadfastly not thinking about the small plastic bag the man had held in front of him [an ignominious package for such an otherworldly substance, one that would make him brilliant and uncaring—no.]

“London.”

“Were you really,” John says sarcastically before cutting himself off again. “No. Sorry, again.”

He shrugs as though it's fine. “What do you want, John?”

And here is the crux of the matter: he no longer knows. Once upon a time he knew John better than he knew himself; he could have deduced exactly how to bring him back to himself, to put down the bottle and use a gun for something other than morbid half-longings. The slightest trace of gun oil on his index finger the day they'd met—that was all Sherlock had needed and he had pulled John the other side of London and back to remind him of a lesson he should have known by heart: that throwing yourself into the path of danger is, paradoxically, a way to stay safe from yourself. Six years on and John still needs to save him from himself, but he is no longer the same person. [The one who laughed, the one who cared.] In fact, Sherlock thinks, settling his gaze on John’s swept back hair, brilliant even in the low light, and his neat cardigan, a better quality than Sherlock has ever seen him wear voluntarily, his appearance is put together in a way that speaks of a refusal to be seen falling apart. John reminds him of himself now, of fires that burn too bright and then not at all, and it is horrifying to think that this is what he has done to him: saved him, only to shatter him.

“I don’t know,” John says, his voice distant. “I don’t know,” he says again and takes another sip.

—

The space around them is bare, stripped of its usual comforts of wallpaper and rugs, paintings and books, and Sherlock feels similarly raw. They sit each to each and the silence is thick as bulletproof glass: but no, Sherlock thinks, that’s not right, it’s bulletproof glass with a fracture spidering across the pane, splintering; and he thinks: polycarbonate with a thickness of 3.175 cm can withstand three shots from a .44 Remington Magnum but what would happen with the fourth shot, he wonders, would it make any bit of difference—

“So,” John says finally, “I should go.”

“No,” Sherlock states, eyes fixed on him.

John rises to his feet, glass in hand, and crosses to the opposite side of the room. He moves like a caged animal, sleek and languid and lethal. “Oh?” His tone deceptively mild. “And why is that?”

Sherlock looks at him, cast into shadow. “Because,” he says, carefully measured, “if you leave now, I won’t see you again. You won’t come back.” Another mercy he grants John: phrasing the sentence to imply that Sherlock came to this decision; implying that Sherlock could have come to such a decision when the very idea of it repels him.

Leaning against an exposed beam, John meets his eyes and takes a sip. One arm crossed over his chest, gripping his scarred shoulder as he drinks: the low light refracts in the amber liquid as he lowers the glass and lets gravity pull it from his fingertips with casual certainty. Sherlock thinks, irrelevantly, about scars knowing when rain is coming on—a proven link between barometric pressure and increased pain, especially with older injuries—and casts himself back: yes, he distinctly recalls the increased moisture in the air as he’d walked the streets, the scent of ozone; when he lets himself, he can feel the same ache in his own scars. His knee twinges, which is new. He’s getting older.

John says, “I didn’t come here to see you.”

“I know. But you stayed anyway.”

His laugh is broken. “I did, didn’t I.” And he sits again, settling himself in the worn upholstery.

A pack of cigarettes occupy a permanent place in the right inside pocket of Sherlock’s coat these days. The room might have windows, but the insulation leaves much to be desired and so he wears his coat still; he need only reach a hand in his coat to grasp the carton. The lighter was a gift from a client over a decade ago: vintage, silver plated and, for the first few years, almost exclusively held to the underside of a bent spoon. It makes a satisfying sound as he lights up.

“Those things’ll kill you, you know,” John says.

He watches the ember burn just beyond his fingertips; exhales smoke. “No,” he says simply. “It won’t.”

—

[“You called him family,” Mycroft had said two weeks ago in the backseat of a ubiquitous black sedan.

“I did,” Sherlock confirmed, impatient. John had not responded to any of his texts, even the one about the triple murder in Chiswick, and the silence had taken a malignant turn: his mind supplied images of John held in a basement by kidnappers, John bleeding out in an alley, John drunk and suffocating on his own vomit, John [worst of all] seeing his attempts to reach out and ignoring him, deciding he was better off alone. Without Sherlock. “Why are you wasting my time with this—haven’t you any sweets that need eating? Where is he?”

His brother’s nostrils flared, eyes lingering on the yellowed remains of the bruises on his face and the shiny beginnings of a scar above his eyebrow, and the object of the conversation suddenly became clear. “No,” Sherlock said disbelievingly.

“Stay away from Doctor Watson.”

He rolled his eyes. “Dull. I intentionally configure a sequence of events so as to induce John to hit me and suddenly you think I’m in danger from him? Honestly, Mycroft. I’m certain that you sympathize with his frustration.”

“Not his. . . particular, shall we say, brand of it,” Mycroft disagreed, tapping his umbrella on the floor, the sound muffled by carpet. “Nonetheless, friends do not behave in such a manner toward one another. His violent tendencies worry me.”

The statement was ludicrous enough that Sherlock’s only possible response was, “Fuck off.”

“The late Mrs Watson was not the only one who could tell when you were lying, Sherlock. And it’s funny, isn’t it,” he said, in a dry tone that brooked no room for humor, “that it was a freelance assassin who saved your life while her husband’s response to her sacrifice was to beat you to the point of hospitalization?”

“Goodbye, Mycroft,” Sherlock spat, getting to his feet.

“Stay away from him.”

Coat swirling around his calves, he turned, furious: at Mycroft, at Mary, at the impossible and absurd turns his life had taken and most of all at John. “Mummy was right, you know,” he said, the words bitter as they rolled off his tongue. “You should have done better. This is all your fault.”

Mycroft stood too still. “221a’s renovations shall be completed by the end of next week,” he said finally, and Sherlock snorted on his way out of the room. “And Sherlock—”

He had paused in the hallway against his better judgement, already regretting the manner in which he had lashed out at Mycroft: not for the sake of his housing, which was unimportant, but because he knew that Mycroft cared for him ruinously and it was cruel to pretend otherwise.

“Doctor Watson is fine,” Mycroft said, and Sherlock’s breath slid out of him in reluctant relief.]

—

It is obvious John wants to leave: his knee jiggles and he takes large, recklessly certain swigs of his whiskey in an attempt to hide his tremor, but Sherlock can still see it. But he does not walk out, and an awareness seeps uncomfortably into his brain that John might have chosen to stay solely because Sherlock himself told him to. One word, John had once said, and the depth of that kind of loyalty is—impossible to contemplate. So he doesn’t. And John has another reason for staying; must have.

The silence has grown too long for his taste. “I’m bored.”

John very nearly smiles, but it hangs wrong on his face: bitterly. “Right. I’ll just—go, then, shall I.” He shifts his weight on the chair as though to stand.

“No.”

“What, then?” John asks. The glass is empty and he refills it, a larger drink this time: he’s resigned to staying. “Is this the part where we play games, like adolescent girls at a slumber party? Two truths and a lie, that would be a lark.”

“Obviously not. It’s not as though we talk about these sorts of things, after all. Or even as though we talk anymore.” The last is intended as a jab but it comes out petulantly; Sherlock wills himself not to flush at his childishness, passingly grateful for the half-demolished flat with its surfeit of shadows.

John has gone still now. He looks worn but dangerous, tightly restrained: this, Sherlock thinks, is a man who would not think twice about pulling a trigger, and he refuses to allow the thought any further but the ghost of it nudges at the back of his mind—the question of where the barrel would be pointed.

“What’s there to talk about?”

“Oh, nothing.” Sherlock flaps a hand dismissively. “Nothing at all.”

“For God’s sake, Sherlock, why—”

“We could talk about why you plan on leaving, or why you blame me for—well, everything, I suppose—that has happened over the past six years, or what I did while I was, as you so quaintly call it, ‘off playing hide and seek’; and we might even discuss why you’re here tonight, because I _don’t know,_ John.”

His voice has tapered off by the end of the tirade, and John faces him head-on now. John is tired, maybe even exhausted judging by lines of his face, and so is Sherlock: he wishes passingly that he could settle under the blanket on the couch and sleep, as he once had, secure in the knowledge that John would be there when he woke. But they have to get through this first.

“You know everything,” John denies. As though it’s as immovable a fact as gravity.

“No.” He shakes his head. “I don’t.”

—

“At least tell me this,” Sherlock says after a while, once silence almost become a third party in the room. “Why is it that you can’t look at me without steeling yourself beforehand?”

John drags his gaze up from the bottom of the glass. “I don’t know what you mean,” he says, meeting Sherlock’s eyes defiantly. Quickly. Too quickly.

“Of course you do,” he dismisses, “and it’s not something new, either, it’s been happening for ages. At first I thought it was understandable: you were, for all intents and purposes, looking at a ghost; it takes time to adjust, or so I’ve been told. And now it’s typical enough that I—I, John—don’t even pay any mind to it. Why?”

“I don’t know.” John shrugs.

“No, you do,” Sherlock says, standing up to cross the gap between the chairs. As soon as Sherlock takes his first step John stands so they’re on equal footing—as though he’s worried about holding his ground, Sherlock thinks, growing angry; as though John thinks of this as a battle, and the anger pushes him that much closer to John, until they are scant inches from each other and tense. Breathing harsh in the cold air. And even in the dim lighting he can see John’s pupils dilate, growing dark and furious, and _oh._

“You,” he says, “you _want_ me.”

John doesn’t move even a centimeter away. He holds his ground, hand tightly grasping the forgotten glass, and Sherlock knows that here be minefields: the tension in John’s features tells him that this is not the only secret he carries. But John’s rage is simmering beneath the surface—carefully, always so controlled—and Sherlock makes another deduction, one that ought to have been obvious:

“And you hate yourself for it,” Sherlock breathes.

John does not refute this. Setting his jaw, he only looks at Sherlock as though daring him to speak again, and Sherlock has never turned down a challenge in his life.

“You thought I knew,” Sherlock concludes heavily. “That I’d—known, and turned you down; that I didn’t want you. But John, how could you not know—?”

“I did,” John says. His voice is defiant in a way that speaks of hidden shame and his muscles are coiled, the tension obvious even through the staid exterior of a navy cardigan: his control is beginning to fracture. He clears his throat. “I did,” John says again, shifting his weight as though readying for a brawl, and Sherlock has no doubt that John would give as good as he got if they came to blows; dawn would break with both men in A&E and their partnership irrevocably lost.

Sherlock doesn’t give John the fight that he’s looking for. Instead he says, unwisely and ardently, utterly fascinated by the small man in front of him, “God, it’s _stunning_ , watching you fall apart.”

And this sentence is the final fracture: the fourth shot, and the reason the glass shouldn’t break. “This,” John says, coldly furious, “this is why. You break people, Sherlock, break them into little pieces and then wonder why they don’t function like they used to. And meanwhile you’re above it all. Better than the rest of us puny mortals, it isn’t as though we matter, really. Just an audience for your genius, that’s all I am, and I—”

John swallows. Clenches his fast spasmodically. “I loved you,” he states, and it feels like the end of something.

Sherlock presses his lips together, a dull ache resonating through his chest. “Past tense,” he observes.

Hesitance. Not borne out of uncertainty, Sherlock observes clinically, and he thinks about the way John’s behavior for two years had seemed strangely off-key in a way that nudged at his recognition: now he sees the bitterness of love severed before its time and resurrected only to taint everything around it like necrosis; John’s rage the brighter for lost love. Murders have been committed for less, he knows this firsthand, and his pride tugs at him—it isn’t fair, he had saved John’s life and Mrs Hudson’s and Gavin’s and given up his livelihood for the interminable trudge of international espionage and wet work; he received a stab wound perilously close to his kidneys and cigarette burns on his shoulderblade and has scars spanning the length of his back, all this in service of saving them, and it isn’t _fair_ —

“Yes,” John says, not looking at him, and it goes quiet again but neither man leaves. Why this is, Sherlock doesn’t know.

—

He thinks again about bulletproof glass. Polycarbonate is known to fail at lower velocities with regular shaped projectiles: it is more resistant to irregularities, fragments. Maybe sometimes simplicity is the better route, even if everything has already shattered.

“I love you,” Sherlock says. He doesn’t know how much time has passed. Dawn hasn’t yet appeared on the horizon and the streetlights cast an amber-tinged hue through the windows: not enough data to form a deduction. The streets are still quiet, or as quiet as a major metropolitan city ever gets, so that’s something. “But you already know that. Don’t you.”

He will give John this: he meets Sherlock’s eyes unflinchingly as he answers. “I do.”

He should be angry, but he when he reaches for the emotion he can’t find it. Instead, there’s an aching sense of loss; familiar, like pressing on an old bruise that’s half-healed.

“But you don’t feel things that way.” John takes a sip, wipes his mouth harshly. “You just want a, a sidekick, or a convenient fuck.”

“No.” Sherlock shakes his head. He doesn’t say: That’s just what you tell yourself so you don’t have to feel guilty, that you hate me for it. He doesn’t say: I wonder how you walk around with such loathing. How you bear it.

He reads want in the dilation of John’s pupils and the set of his mouth: John wants to fuck him, and Sherlock finds himself contemplating the idea; he might even enjoy it, with John’s hands grasping his hips and John’s breath panting on his back and John’s cock moving in him, but there is the aftermath to consider. Bruises blooming dark on his hips and on the tender skin of his neck after John leaves, because—wouldn’t he, wouldn’t he leave? John doesn’t want a fuck, even, he just thinks he does: he wants to possess Sherlock and make him plead and probably even to hurt him, and Sherlock thinks he has had enough of bruises. John would only hate himself more come morning in any case, and Sherlock thinks about self-loathing and how it wears and sometimes snaps.

“It has to be true.” John runs a hand over his hair, not yet used to the new style; it disarrays. He looks, in every way, like he’s coming apart. “Because if it isn’t—” He takes another sip of whiskey straight from the flask. “If it isn’t true, then that would mean that you’re a good man. And you aren’t. You can’t be.”

“I’m not,” he says. Sherlock wishes he could find indignation within him; how unfair after a lifetime of building up resentment to find that it has dissipated at the moment he needs it most, and so he is tired nearly to the point of exhaustion. He cannot do this anymore: cannot take the brunt of John’s rage; cannot be the unmoving mass upon which John wears himself out and emerges purged. “But, John—listen to me. I am human, even if you don’t always think so. And you are hurting me.”

John looks at him then, unmoving, and Sherlock can see the ghost of the man he once was: the ghosts of who they both were, really, and he thinks about how John had gone from seeing him as human to thinking he was something more exalted; he remembers how glorious it had felt, the near-worship, and knows that he would have given it up in a nanosecond had he known its final destination: here, this flat, with John sitting across from him and looking as though he’s been punched by the reminder that Sherlock is flesh and bone. That he knows pain.

They sit, each to each, and after a moment John breathes out a long breath. “Oh, god, Sherlock,” he says, his tone somewhere between horrified and ashamed, “I don’t—I don’t even know what to say.”

Sherlock sits silently. He feels brittle and so he turns up his coat collar and sets his face into something hard and aloof, but that’s no longer an effective shield: John doesn’t turn away as he once did, angry at Sherlock’s coldness; instead he looks at Sherlock as though he understands, and somehow this is harder to bear.

“I have a ticket for the 10.30 train to Sussex,” John says after a moment.

It is not the response Sherlock expected to hear; then again, he doesn’t know what he expected. He tries to keep his lips from twisting with bitterness. “Give my goodbyes to Watson,” he tells John, who merely stares at him for a moment, concern melding with the barest hint of amusement.

“I’m not getting on it.”

Something that feels very like hope flares in Sherlock’s chest, and he only half-successfully represses it. He asks, “Why?”

John thinks before he replies, his eyebrows lowering in thought, and Sherlock loves them—loves him. It terrifies him, even having sat with the thought for years: he carried it around like a note, worrying the paper until it softened from movement and darkened from frequent handling. “Because this is my life,” John says finally. “This city is my home. My work is here. And you’re here, and—God knows, I don’t want to presume anything. But don’t you feel that, somewhere along the line, we lost sight of everything? Aside from my daughter, you’re the most important person in my life. Maybe we can work out way toward being friends once more.”

“Friends,” Sherlock says, tasting the word on his tongue.

“At least,” John says, slanting him a look. “But, and answer me honestly—do you even know what you want right now? I don’t. I know what I feel, and I don’t like myself for a lot of it. That’s not something for you to carry.”

“Not so long ago,” he admits, “I wanted to spend my life with you.”

“But you don’t know now,” John says evenly, absorbing it. It isn’t a question, and Sherlock wishes that they could negotiate a future without so many hurts, large and small, between them; at some point John will surely come to see the scars on Sherlock’s back, and in sunlight he would find that the only decoration on the walls of the half-destroyed flat is the sheet music of the piece Sherlock had composed for his wedding: the note John had given him after Mary’s death, and a reminder of the consequences of his mistakes.

He agrees with John: he doesn’t know anymore. But—”John,” he says, “you have to know that I’m going to hurt you. Not on purpose, you understand, but it’s who I am, and so you might want to leave regardless.”

John looks at him: looks at the earnestness written on his face, the expression infrequent enough that it feels odd on his face, and huffs out a laugh. “Nice try,” he says, “but you’ll have to do better than that. You forget I lived through a head in the fridge. I can deal with most anything.” After a moment he adds, “And actually I can’t remember the last time you hurt me. I don’t think you ever have, intentionally.”

The darkness in the flat has shifted incrementally as the dawn approaches. Soon the rubbish collectors will be by, and the 5 a.m. regulars at Speedy’s will exchange tepid little greetings as they pass through the entrance, and the early morning joggers will be followed by the rest of the world and the chaos of another day. Sherlock wonders how he will fit into it. “So what now?”

“We,” John says after thinking for a moment, “we live, I suppose.”

Sherlock wrinkles his nose at the mundanity of this [but mostly, he will admit, to see the way John bites back a smile at his petulant expression].

“What else is there, though?” John says quietly: a rhetorical question, because both of them know the answer intimately.

The silence, as it falls, no longer has the same sharpness to it. “I’d best be going,” John says after a bit, and his words are similarly transformed; no longer a threat but mere acknowledgement that life goes on and needs living.

“Stay,” Sherlock says, tacking on a hasty, “please.”

John tilts his head, querying. They are both exhausted in body and spirit and mind, in every possible way; Sherlock’s body sinks into the leather of his chair like lead falling through water.

“I have to pick up Rosie by seven,” John says. Cautiously open to staying.

“Please,” Sherlock says, “stay and watch the dawn with me,” and he is uncomfortably aware that he is asking for too much: asking for something foolish, at any rate; but this is belied by the urgency he feels. It is almost a physical need, to see John’s weary face gilded by the first light of dawn and know that he is real and maybe, just possibly, the smallest of John’s fingers would brush against his without John pulling back: something akin to desperation is evident in his voice and he hates it, hates his vulnerability.

John looks at him like he understands. “Okay,” he says quietly. Levers himself onto his feet and gestures for Sherlock to do the same. They make their way up to the roof in silence.

Outside the air is cool and wet. It had rained at some point in the past few hours: Sherlock doesn’t recall when; he thinks that this should be disconcerting before dismissing the thought. London is very nearly still around them, the faintest tinges of light overtaking the rust color of light-polluted clouds.

They sit with their backs against the chimney, concrete and brick leaching the heat from the bodies. This isn’t about comfort, anyway.

The light around them is golden when Sherlock finally speaks. “Walk midtown at night,” he tells John, indicating the tall buildings in the distance with a tilt of his head, “and you’ll see that every one of them uses the same fluorescent lights in the ceiling. Hideous, really.”

“Okay,” John says.

Sherlock says, “You make life bearable.”

There is no response at his side, and after a moment Sherlock turns his head to find John smiling sadly. Regretfully, maybe: wondering at who they have been and what they have done. “Tell me you’d leave me,” John says.

He doesn’t pretend not to understand, but neither can he give John what he wants: Sherlock knows in a place deep and hard in his chest that he would not leave, that almost no circumstance on earth could induce him to leave now; that John could have beaten him bloody—again—and he still would not have left. Would have asked for more. Sherlock can almost touch it, this parallel universe in which they destroy each other. He wants John like he wants nicotine or morphine or cocaine or heroin [in this context Mycroft’s actions make sense; he’s always been overbearing about Sherlock’s various addictions]: but then, he’d turned down the cocaine mere hours before. He could do better, really. When it came to John, Sherlock knows he won’t.

His silence is an answer. “Jesus, Sherlock,” John sighs. They’re quiet as the rubbish bins are emptied, metallic clanging ricocheting through the air. “This is a bad idea,” he states as the vehicle rumbles away.

“Yes,” Sherlock agrees. There’s no point in denying it.

John shrugs. “Our specialty.”

Their eyes meet and Sherlock looks hastily away, but it’s no use and they dissolve into giggles. It reminds him of their first case with the cabbie, after the chase: three stories down and [he approximates] two yards to their left, leaning up against the wall and laughing at the feral joy of it all.

Sherlock wants to reach out for John’s hand but refrains; instead, he curls both fists into the hem of his coat, digging his nails into the heavy wool. He wants, he wants, he wants. “Stay,” he says, “please,” and they watch the sun rise on another grey day together.

**Author's Note:**

> I hope you enjoyed it, and thanks for reading!


End file.
